The Book of the King's Daughters traces the mythical stories surrounding Medea and Pocahontas. The second volume of the Pocahontas series explores how ancient Greek "king's daughters," used by the gods to bear offspring, were made subservient and eventually handed down as mythical figures into the age of pop culture and advertising. While their semi-divine offspring turn against them in the end and make themselves useful in the service of the divine fathers, the king's daughters are confronted with the loss of their culture and remain as victims of the male claim to ownership and conquest of land, a fate that apparently can only be turned around in Medea's case by the murder of her own child. Klaus Theweleit's legendary Pocahontas series also still addresses current gender issues and touches on traditional female roles.
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Klaus Theweleit, born in East Prussia in 1942, studied German and English. Today he lives as a freelance writer with teaching assignments in Germany, the USA, Switzerland and Austria. Between 1998 and 2008, Theweleit was professor of art and theory at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe. He became known for his monumental work Männerphantasien (1977/78), a new edition of which was published by Matthes & Seitz Berlin in 2019. Rudolf Augstein called it "perhaps the most exciting German-language publication of this year" in Der Spiegel after its initial publication.
